​(RNS) — Philip Roth’s death at age 85 marks the end of an extraordinary writing career. In my mind, Roth was the greatest American author of the past 60 years.

I’m a fast reader and usually get through most novels quickly. Not so with Roth’s many remarkable writings. His carefully crafted books demand slow reading because of his rich, tightly composed prose. Indeed, I often reread his words again and again simply to admire his magnificent command of the English language.

​(RNS) — For most people April 19 is just another springtime day on the calendar: the baseball season is well underway, it’s often the date for the Boston Marathon, and the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., are usually just past their peak.

But April 19 is deeply embedded within my personal memory bank.

On that date 75 years ago, in 1943, I was a youngster traveling with my family from Alexandria, Va., to Pittsburgh to participate in a Passover seder at my grandparents’ home located in what was then rightly called “The Steel City.”

It was the midst of World War II, and my father, a U.S. Army major, was stationed at Fort Belvoir. He had carefully accumulated enough rationing coupons to provide sufficient gasoline for the round trip in our 1940 Chrysler.

(RNS) — Politicians have a “last hurrah.” Athletes take a “victory lap.” For Billy Graham, who announced that his 2005 New York crusade would be his final one in that city, it was a “last hallelujah.”Graham, who died at age 99 on Wednesday (Feb. 21), was the nation’s most prominent religious leader for more than 50 years. He suffered from prostate cancer, fluid on the brain, deafness in one ear and a broken hip requiring the use of a walker. Yet, he pressed on with his evangelistic message.

​Like another religious icon, St. John Paul II, Graham preached sermons of faith and hope despite physical pain and an awareness that death could be near. Like Karol Wojtyla, Billy Graham was a “Lion in Winter” who did not easily surrender to the inevitable.

(RNS) — “Go Home N—-r.”In late September, five African-American students in the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Preparatory School, located on the academy’s Colorado Springs, Colo., campus, confronted those three words on their dormitory message boards.When he learned of the obscene message, Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Jay B. Silveria was furious. Silveria, a combat jet pilot who grew up in an Air Force family, quickly summoned the school’s 4,000 cadets and 1,500 staff members to hear him deliver a powerful lecture on the evils of prejudice and racism.​“If you’re outraged by those words, then you’re in the right place,” Silveria said. “That kind of behavior has no place at the prep school, has no place at USAFA (the Air Force Academy) and has no place in the United States Air Force. We would all be naive to think that everything is perfect here. We would be naive to think that we shouldn’t discuss this topic. We would also be tone deaf not to think about the backdrop of what’s going on in our country. Things like Charlottesville and Ferguson, the protests in the NFL.”

(RNS) As a freshly minted rabbi, I was an Air Force chaplain at Itazuke Air Base in Japan. Two days after my arrival at the base, I was officially introduced to Itazuke’s commander. He was a gruff fighter pilot who in physical appearance and style of speaking could have been John Wayne’s clone. Read Entire Article HERE.

This year marks the anniversaries of four historical events that changed world history and continue to affect millions of people today.By coincidence, all four events took place in years that end with the number seven: 1897, 1917, 1947, 1967. The number seven, while lucky for gamblers, also plays a major role in Jewish life. The ancient seven-branched menorah or candelabrum is the official symbol of the modern State of Israel. Shabbat, the seventh day of the week, signifies the completed work of creation. Seven blessings are recited at Jewish weddings, and there are seven biblical matriarchs and patriarchs. So maybe it’s no accident that some important historical events have taken place in the years ending with the number seven.

Losing one’s friends to death is the price we must eventually pay for the gift of being alive, and last week I paid a steep one when Cardinal William H. Keeler, the 14th archbishop of Baltimore, died at age 86.Laudatory obituaries noted the cardinal’s membership as a youth in the Boy Scout movement, where he met many Jewish and Protestant Scouts. The obituaries also recounted his 1955 ordination to the priesthood and his participation as a special adviser during the Second Vatican Council, when the world’s Catholic bishops overwhelmingly adopted the historic Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) declaration that represented a revolutionary change in the church’s teachings toward Jews and Judaism.

(RNS) A decade ago, a critic accused me of writing a book about a “nonexistent” threat from the religious right. One reviewer called my work a “paranoid rant” while another detractor wrote my “alarmist” views were “exaggerated and implausible.”

In “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans For The Rest Of Us,” published in 2006, I had warned that a well-financed and highly organized group of religious and political leaders was seeking to impose their narrow extremist beliefs and harsh public policies on the United States, even as our nation’s population was increasingly multireligious, multiethnic, and multiracial.

The intention of that group, whom I labeled “Christocrats,” was to establish a white-dominated nationalistic “Christian America” officially buttressed and ruled by judicial, presidential and congressional law.

(RNS) In 2012, President Barack Obama declared the United States would always be “the one indispensable nation in world affairs.”​

“No other nation seeks the role that we play in global affairs,” he added. “That includes shaping the global institutions of the 20th century to meet the challenges of the 21st.”But only five years later, many people wonder whether that remarkable era of world leadership is now coming to an end. Donald Trump has publicly spoken of abandoning America’s longtime commitments in many regions of the world. Just this week, reports indicate President Trump plans to slash the number of refugees who can resettle in the U.S. and block Syrians and others from entering.

(RNS) Each time I publicly speak about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the leader of the American Jewish community during the 1930s and 1940s, there is a heated, sometimes angry debate among audience members that can be summed up in just four words: “Roosevelt and the Jews.”FDR’s critics say the leader of the world’s most powerful country failed to use his extraordinary political capital to take lifesaving executive actions that would have countered, perhaps even prevented, the Nazis’ mass murder of more than 6 million Jews.Roosevelt’s detractors claim that behind his jaunty demeanor, broad smile and omnipresent cigarette holder was a “closet anti-Semite” who failed to open wide the gates of entry for Jewish refugees who desperately sought to escape the Nazi killing machine in Europe.And there is always this counterargument: FDR, after his election in 1932, faced the devastating Great Depression, strong anti-immigrant feeling and a virulent anti-Semitism fueled by Catholic priest Charles Coughlin’s obscene weekly radio broadcasts and the anti-Jewish speeches of aviator hero Charles Lindbergh.This side further argues that beginning in 1941, Roosevelt, as commander in chief, successfully led a vast global military campaign that defeated not only Nazism, but fascism and Japanese militarism as well.